Women who persevered
They were girls in a war before they were names in a history book.
Six women who kept writing, teaching, treating and organising while the ground moved under them. Most were younger than the students we teach today.
Germany · 1921–1943
Sophie Scholl
A Munich student who wrote and distributed leaflets against the Nazi regime with the White Rose. She was executed at twenty-one.
Pakistan · born 1997
Malala Yousafzai
She wrote publicly about going to school under Taliban rule in Swat, was shot for it at fifteen, and returned to the same argument. Nobel Peace Prize, 2014.
Netherlands · 1929–1945
Anne Frank
Hidden in an Amsterdam annexe for two years, she kept a diary from the age of thirteen. She died at Bergen-Belsen; her father published what she wrote.
Iraq · born 1993
Nadia Murad
A Yazidi survivor of captivity who chose to testify under her own name rather than anonymously. She shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018.
Somalia · 1947–2020
Hawa Abdi
One of Somalia's first female doctors. The clinic she opened on her family's farmland became a camp sheltering tens of thousands through the civil war.
Liberia · born 1972
Leymah Gbowee
She organised women across religious lines into a sit-in that helped force an end to Liberia's second civil war. Nobel Peace Prize, 2011.
The gap, in numbers
girls out of school worldwide
Source: UNESCO
more likely than boys to be out of school in conflict-affected countries
Source: UNICEF
women and girls living in conflict-affected contexts
Source: UN Women
Girls
A girl is the first thing a war takes out of school, and the last thing it puts back.
In every country we report from, the gap between boys and girls widens the longer a conflict runs. This page records what girls are stopped from doing, and who refused to stop.
What stops them
Six things a girl loses first
Secondary school
Where schools close, girls are the last to be re-enrolled when they reopen.
The walk to class
Distance and checkpoints end attendance long before the classroom does.
Sitting the exam
Without papers there is no certificate, and no proof she ever studied.
Being registered
A birth unrecorded becomes an age unproven, and a marriage unchallenged.
Medical care
Treatment that waits on a guardian's consent frequently does not arrive.
Being counted
Surveys taken household by household miss the girls kept indoors.